Lived realities of urban peripheries: building infrastructures of change

Abstract

Apartheid was enacted spatially through infrastructural investment to support institutionalised racism and class inequality. Post-apartheid redress centred on provision of housing, basic services and social grants, but over 26 years later the response has been inadequate. Apartheids spectre persists, as millions of South Africans continue to struggle in unsafe and overcrowded conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and intensified these conditions. Through ethnographic attentiveness to the everyday struggles of those living on the fringes, research by the University of Cape Town and the HSRC shows the inadequacy of infrastructural access and the lived effects of widespread income and resource insecurity.